This week, I pulled double duty on WIBC. First I made my regular pre-presidential debate visit. The Presidential debate came and went. Most of us who watched it were probably fighting sleep as it failed to yield the fireworks the previous two Presidential debates and the vice presidential debates did. But leave it to my home state and a good old fashioned Senate debate to liven things up for the week and bring me back.

As you may have heard, Richard Mourdock made some comments regarding abortion as it pertains to rape, pregnancies and God intentions. Not exactly the subject Republican male senate candidates should probably be commenting on. However, the response was swift and full of misinterpretation while Democrats have cried in faux outrage claiming that Richard Mourdock is Todd Akin 2.0. That observation is completely absurd. Here is my exchange.

Mourdock is not Todd Akin (who offered his idiotic non-scientific view that a pregnancy can’t result from rape). And Akin, for all the attention showered on him at the Democratic convention and by the media, has not harmed Romney one bit. In this case Romney has said he doesn’t share Mourdock’s view. I don’t expect he’ll have anything to say further, and if he does, he’s nuts. The president who can’t be bothered to answer questions about four Americans murdered on his watch and his serial prevarication says Mourdock’s comments were “outrageous.” What does that tell you about his character?

This should also tell you the priorities of Joe Donnelly. At this point in the race, with Mitt Romney and Mike Pence running away with their elections (in Indiana at least) Donnelly needed a distraction and unfortunately, Richard Mourdock gave him one. Donnelly doesn’t want to talk about his multiple votes to raise the debt limit, or his support for the bank bailouts or the Obama stimulus package or for Obamacare or his support for a President who is on the record for supporting infanticide and voting against support for rape victims.

No, Joe Donnelly would rather have you avoid looking at the man behind the curtain while also avoiding the gigantic hole in his (and others who claim “my God wouldn’t allow…”) so-called religious views. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal notes:

As an analytical matter, however, Mourdock’s statement is entirely defensible, whereas Akin’s is sophistry. And it turns out that Mourdock’s Democratic opponent, in seeking to capitalize on the remark, is engaging in Akin-style sophistry.

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Donnelly, seeking to capitalize on the kerfuffle, “put out a statement attacking Mourdock,” the Hill reports:

“I think rape is a heinous and violent crime in every instance,” Donnelly said in the statement. “The God I believe in and the God I know most Hoosiers believe in does not intend for rape to happen–ever. What Mr. Mourdock said is shocking, and it is stunning that he would be so disrespectful to survivors of rape.”

Donnelly is engaging in some sleazy innuendo here. Mourdock’s assertion about what “God intended” clearly referred to conception (“when life begins”), not rape.

But what’s interesting about Donnelly’s statement is that he claims to agree with Mourdock’s central premises: that God exists, and that unborn children are human beings worthy of legal protection (or, as the Hill puts it, Donnelly “is also against abortion rights”). Donnelly differs from Mourdock only in reaching the opposite conclusion on the specific question of a rape exception.

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Donnelly, however, is as dismissive of the question as Akin. He professes a belief in God yet appears never to have grappled with the problem of evil. Surely “the God . . . most Hoosiers believe in” is omnipresent, yet he is somehow AWOL, in Donnelly’s theodicy, anytime a woman is raped.

Democrats and their pundits have their “radical, extremist and out-of-touch” talking points, but all they are trying to do is pivot away from the issues, such as jobs and the economy, that matter most to Hoosiers. And by avoiding the real issues, that shows just how out of touch they really are.